Last Things

by Jenny Offill

Book Overview

To eight-year-old Grace Davitt, the world is full of strange wonders. Through the eyes of her mother, Anna--an ornithologist who speaks five languages--their small lakeside town in Vermont becomes a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374184054
• ISBN13: 9780374184056
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 263 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

It is funny and intelligent and serious.

While a large number of fiction writers puts thoughts in their characters'heads, creating cardboard cut-outs rather than human beings, she puts thoughts into readers' heads. Her world is populated with people and things, and being lost in it is a privilege.

Beautiful!

Offill has a poet's command of language--her prose is breathtaking. And the story is utterly compelling: I found the characters fascinating. (I wished only to know a little more about Grace's father.) This novel *is* worthy of the comparison to Marilynne Robinson's *Housekeeping*.

great clarity about childhood

To all the damaged and also creative, unique human beings who continuously try to get the connection between who they are and how they were raised in whatever kind of family they were born and brought up, this book is speaking. And if that weren't enough, the story is well-crafted and beautifully written.

A Beautiful and Compelling Novel! Don't Miss it!

Last Things' by Jenny Offill is that rare novel that immediately draws you in and intimately involves you with the lives and feelings of remarkable characters. Grace Davitt, the eight-year old narrator speaks in an absolutely compelling voice that is not tainted by adult judgement or coloration. She processes information as she receives it and is caught in the abyss between a rationalistic scientist father and a unique and engaging ornothologist mother who is going mad.The mother Anna is beautifully drawn; we see through her creativity, impulsivity, and inconsistency the power of her increasingly mad view of life. Offill's prose is concise and powerful; not a word seems out-of-place or wasted. Her subtle humor, the interweaving of the themes of extinction, myth, relationships, and family were riveting to me. I've read 'Last Things' twice and will go back to it again. I highly recommend it to you; you will not be disappointed.

A remarkably fluid, talented, and arresting debut.

My girlfriend and I have spent the past week reading this book aloud to each other; most books don't stand up to that kind of abuse. But Offill's sentences are so carefully, artlessly constructed, that they float off the page, and the story's momentum carried us forward into many a sleepless spring night. The protagonist, an eight year old girl who describes the steady deterioration of her mother's sanity and family structure, has a clarity of tone that anchors the book's wonderful off kilterness in a solid, utterly believable foundation. Events unfold so unpredictably, but with such authority and control on Offill's part -- in the past, we'd given ourselves over to a book only to feel betrayed at the end. With Last Things, we felt rewarded, and lucky. This is a book to treasure and tell friends about.